You need a budget (YNAB) advice thread

loupoppins

thank you again! I have a basic salary which I know the amount of, but I then work extra hours on call, which then have to get signed off by about 3 different people and get to payroll by the cut off date. Sometimes the process takes 1 week, sometimes 2 months(!) so I never quite know how many extra hours Ill get paid that month, regardless of what I've worked!!
I did consider putting in my salary as if Id been paid it , but decided that was a bad idea!
For now I am just focusing on May's budget which allocates what I've got left to spend till Friday, and not looking too closely at the figures I've put in for June. Then on Friday I'll put in salary figures and take it form there.
I will watch out for the bug you described , thanks for that tip.
It is a very big learning curve, but I am hoping it will work for us .

hiddenshadow

Good luck with it! For us I found the methodology clicked right away but figuring out how to actually put it into practice with both the app and using it everyday took a couple of pay cycles.

I'd recommend watching the classes as well to get a sense of how things work. They have a few classes for the new version on youtube and quite a few for the old version (which are still useful as far as learning the methodology).

louby40

I've been using the free trial for about 2 weeks now. I've downloaded the most recent version. I got paid on the 27th so was finally able to budget for the first time.

I really like it and know it will really help me budget. Because of various commitments I have during August I can see there is no money left to buy a blind I need for my bathroom. That will now have to wait until September.

In my pre YNAB days I would have just ordered it and gone overdrawn. Not anymore. YNAB makes you think differently!

louby40

If anyone can post the youtube videos that link to the nYNAB that would be great.

The old ones have been helpful but aren't always relevant to the new version.

hiddenshadow

Congrats on more awareness with YNAB! It really is amazing what a difference it can make.

Learn to Prioritise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VICxkAeDVDM

Debt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K77djjWmdQc

Age of Money: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ma1C24d6pEQ

louby40

Thanks!! ����

louby40

Going through my budget last night (I'm actually on holiday in Spain - don't you just love the Internet) and I realised I'd budgeted £71 instead of £17 for my house insurance - I'd swapped the numbers round.

I was so happy that I had more money to budget!

Also made me realise that you do need to keep going back and checking/tweaking working on it.

I love it

PollyWollyDoodle

I'm sure this has been asked before on here, but after trawling through about 30 pages I gave up! I bought YNAB about 18 months ago after reading advice on here, and I have to say it's been brilliant for keeping on top of my bank account - I reconcile every week. I'm self employed so need to keep good records, and as I keep business expenses separately (although within the same budget) it's easy to see exactly what I've spent on fuel, postage etc.

So far so good - what I haven't actually been doing is the budgeting bit - when I left work I had almost no income, and a largeish savings buffer that I'd kept for exactly that purpose. Because it wasn't coming in as monthly income, and because most of my outgoings are fixed DDs and I'm very frugal in the non-essential expenditure, I was just whack-a-moleing out of the savings and I gave up after a few months. Of course it's updated automatically because everything in the bank accounts is categorised, but after the first few months I haven't bothered setting budget figures or 'given every dollar a job'.

Now I am getting some regular monthly income (and the savings have reduced!) I'd like to start using the Budget facility but it's a mess - the headers tell me that I seem to have overspent most months but not budgeted all my income. Should I start a new budget which means recreating all the categories and won't have past monthly averages etc? Or should I do the FreshStart, I know it says it saves a copy but will I be able to run reports from that? Or should I bite the bullet and go back through previous months and try and unravel it? I don't want to lose all the current records, because it's so useful to have the reports on what has been spent.

Any advice welcome, this thread has been so helpful in the past and I absolutely love the bank rec facility, which has saved me hours of time.

SueP19

I've only been using it for a few weeks but I know from doing accounts, it's harder to unravel than it is to start fresh

If it were me I would cut my loses and restart, concentrate on the "now"

LMG1305

If you start afresh it still keeps your old budget which you can load, but I think it only does this if you are connected to Dropbox, because it saves the file in Dropbox. I could be wrong though, maybe it saves the file wherever you ask it to. I have started afresh a few times and still have the old files from previous budgets.


Anyway, what I would do in your position is to work out the averages based on what you currently have (there is an option for this by clicking on the lightning icon in the box at the top of each month). Write all these figures down and then start afresh using the figures you've just taken down.